Last night, after the rain cleared and the clouds parted, the sun cast the most beautiful sunset as it slid out of the sky. There was still a light drizzle, and my sister and I donned our rain jackets and ran out onto our driveway to stare at the marvel that was unfolding in front of our eyes. The sun's rays leached across the sky like a watercolor painting, casting the world in a pink, orange, and red hue. For the half hour we were out there, it was as if we were experiencing our own version of the aurora borealis. It was euphoric.
In that moment, time stopped. As I gazed at the orchestra of colors in front of me, I felt a sense of clarity. It was a weird emotion, one that could only be evoked by such a sight. I felt as if the sun's limbo between the day and the night was similar to my reality. Just like the sunset, I was stuck between two chapters of my life. The previous one was the last four years in high school, going home to loving family and friends. The next was one of uncertainty, with only the basic parameters set in place. Sure, I knew what I was going to study, where I was going to school, but those were the only answers I had. For the most part, the next chapter was one filled with blank pages.
I am between two stages of my life. One where I am a child, coddled and cared for, and the other where I take the reigns of my own life and forge my own path. This is a phenomenon known as Entering The Real World, or how the 1988 movie Heathers put it,
Before industrialization, the family lived together and died together. Farms were the start and end of your life. You worked along side your siblings and parents, and striking it out on your own was a rarity. Contrast that with now, where at the ripe old age of 18, teenagers are to be cast out into a new, alien world, one that is drastically different than the one they were taught in. You're not automatically rewarded for working hard anymore, and you don't deserve success just because you did x, y, and z. Luck is rewarded randomly, fairness is thrown out the window, and you're fed to the sharks. Just like Heathers put it, we're little eaglets right now. And suddenly, at a certain point of our life, we're supposed to take a leap of faith and join the other eagles soaring in a barren sky.
I like where I am now, where I know what's coming next and I know what to expect. Don't clean your room, and you get scolded. 7 pm is when dinner is set on the table. Forget about a doctor's appointment? Your parents will remind you. But now, that schedule and routine we've stuck by for the past 18 years of our lives ... now those rules are subject to change. Because when we enter college, we won't have someone to remind us, scold us, or push us. Dinner is whenever we want it to be. Cleaning your room is a choice. Forgetting about a doctor's appointment means missing it and rescheduling. The responsibilities of keeping ourselves on our 'A game' is now given entirely to us, and that is so scary to me. For many of us, school, extracurriculars, and our friends were our only priority ... but now, we assume the roles that our parents played in our lives as well. Our balanced lives no longer have the counterweights of our families - it's up to us to figure out how to even out the scale by ourselves.
Now, I don't want to sound like a complete Debbie Downer about this whole College Thing - of course, college is known to be an escape, a sense of freedom, a rediscovery of yourself - but I have just as much fear as I have excitement. I fear the unknown and the things I can't control. In a few months, the only lives we have ever known will never be the same again.
If there's anything I want to tell the underclassmen, it's to take advantage of the time you have now. Yes, the cliche, age old advice of 'valuing your highschool years because they go by oh-so-fast'. But I feel as if the meaning of 'living out your highschool years' is largely clouded by stereotypes. Living out your highschool years doesn't mean having fun every single second of your life. It's not doing the craziest thing you can think of without thinking of the repercussions, or doing anything you want just because you can. It's about growth and investing in yourself. Your highschool years are not the best years of your life - neither are your college years. I am strongly against the idea that life peaks in our adolescence, and everything afterwards is a downwards slope. We should not view life as a negative parabola ... it should be exponential, or at least linearly positive.
What this means is that really living out your highschool years is living a well-rounded life. It's staying healthy, keeping up your studies, and having fun. It's starting to figure out that balance that you'll have to man yourself later. It's knowing that the next chapter, whatever it is, will be nothing less than your teenage years. This is achievable by focusing on your future, but also keeping your feet in the present. Evening the scale. Finding the happy medium.
And now, when I think back to that sunset ... perhaps it's a metaphor. Our lives aren't divvied into sections to conquer - our entire lives are a limbo between the chapters. Even if you're in college, you're in the phase between school and a job; even when you're getting married, you're in the middle between complete independence and investing in a family. And for many of us, frightened of what's to come, we have nothing else to do but what we have done since we entered this great big world - embrace the unknown, and make something that's strange into something familiar. I have the utmost faith in us, Class of 2020. For us, our beautiful sunsets will never turn into night - our lives will continue to be a never-ending explosion of color.
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